For some reason I thought it would be nice to come out here for my morning bike ride.* Wtf. The bay area is making me super woo woo.

*Believe me, I know.

[the only worthwhile sentences from the draft i just deleted.]

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying ‘Open wider’ so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

Pico Iyer | The point of the long and winding sentence

[And with that, I have an alibi.]

How are they not going to have this in my size?

for the record, i began tripping precisely at the moment when mick jagger showed up and started dropping hashtag lines that somehow, miraculously, managed to exceed, in inanity as in incoherence, lines from will.i.am that included the prepubescent “this beat is the shit…#feces” and the proto-juvenile “i woke up in the morning/hard like morning wood in the morning,” i.e. lines that included jagger’s wtf-inducing “hard like geometry/or trigonometry/it’s crazy!/#psychology!”

omg I lost it when the car turned into the truck….and then the train…omg…and now the space segment???? yes I too can feel my sense of political possibility withering at the speed of light

so when i was talking about the importance of moving away from political pessimism, i’m wondering why no one just sent me this video?  because this kinda just obliterated any foundation my sense of political possibility rested upon.

harunwasagoon:

lowendtheory a ajouté votre billet à ses coups de cœur : Libidinal Economy is

LOWENDTHEORY YOU BRIEFLY APPEARED IN YOUR TUMBLR FORM IN MY DREAM LAST NIGHT. Apparently I was looking for you so I posted on tumblr “I am looking for lowendtheory” and 2 minutes later there were 3000 notes on the post. 

Don’t ask. 

yes, i did just become the person who starts uncomfortable family fights on a holiday when all anybody wants to do is ignore life and eat cookies.

midwestmountainmama:

i am *that* person now. great.

welcome to the club!  we have t-shirts!

(Source: milkeemountainmama)

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.

Azealia Banks - 212 feat. Lazy Jay

so, for real: who else is out there killing a beat like this whilst rocking pigtails and a mickey mouse sweater? and smiling? 

shana—e has putting me onto a lot of good stuff recently.  what are y’all listening to?

i am still listening to this album.

So I just realized that I made this post a year ago today.  Which is kinda, well.  A lot has happened in this past year.  In some ways it contains the seeds of most of the stuff I’ve been trying to use this space to talk about over the past year—unacknowledged class/racial/gender dynamics that inhabit political formations that are, on the surface, anti-oppression; the importance of building and embracing political spaces that are uncomfortable without trying to make the uncomfortable a new kind of comfortable; looking for places where political solidarities might be able to emerge if we don’t get trapped by some of the ways of forging solidarity that we’ve inherited; struggling with the contradictions that sometimes give me too much authority to speak on some issues (often on the implicit or explicit condition that I  effectively present myself as a class-interested, respectable, and/or authentic caricature of myself) and assume that I am in no position to speak on others because of assumptions of what it means to reside in the body in which I reside; trying to acknowledge and account for my own privilege without turning such acknowledging and accounting into a pious formality or an empty gesture; etc.

I was reminded that I made this post a year ago because comrades from Critical Resistance were over my house last night stuffing envelopes and stamping postcards in order to ask for donations.  We’re still trying to build an international movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex.  So again, please, if you have anything to spare this time of year, it’d be incredibly fabulous if you could donate something.

bronze-by-gold:

champagnecandy answered your question: So basically the difference between a professional troll and an admirable contrarian is prose style and social standing?

no. Hitchens was a professional troll. and a great writer. one can be both.

Having a nice prose style is not enough to make a great writer, though it’s popular—and safer—to think so. Joanna Russ, whose death earlier this year didn’t receive anywhere near so much attention, was a great writer because she could write great sentences and because her thought went beyond provocation to actual innovation. Hitchens was a good enough writer. Moreover, misogyny and other bigotries are not only political or social justice issues but also aesthetic problems; they are limits on the sympathetic imagination which needs to be as unfettered as possible to make great writing.

(Source: chapel-eyes-odd)

bye followers